Dark Matter – Olives’ First Impression

This game has some real potential to it. The story is fascinating and though it says horror in the genre, it isn’t that scary. The basic outline is a robot AI core that has watched the humans on this spaceship die after being taken over by aliens.

This game has some real potential to it. The story is fascinating and though it says horror in the genre, it isn’t that scary. The basic outline is a robot AI core that has watched the humans on this spaceship die after being taken over by aliens. However, the ship was carrying cryo-chambers filled with frozen humans. All but one were dead from the attack and the one who lived is the only hope for the AI core and herself to get out of this ship alive. Now this is going to sound very Portal –esque but the surviving human apparently has had some brain damage from being in the chamber but she is still able to hold a gun and shoot. She can’t however, tell the AI her name or where she is from, all we know is AI picked up some records that said she was in maintenance. You play as this woman throughout the game as the AI watches her and helps her out when it can. The AI also named her Ensign because it didn’t know what else to do.

Graphics:

Pretty good! Though Ensign is still a little shaky at times, she is actually a pretty good model. The lighting is amazing, as I crawled through the dimly lit passageways, I could see a beautiful lights and shadows coming off of Ensign and aliens crawling across the walls. The game is a 3D side scroller in which it’s almost frustrating you can’t move around objects in your path because the 3D is portrayed so well.

Gameplay:

For me, it was hard to control the mouse because you need it to aim and open door and such. I imagine a little tweaking with the mouse sensitivity and it’ll be just fine. Besides that, almost everything is intuitive. Tab = Map, LShift = Sprint, and WASD keys for moving around. I’m not much of a side scroller player besides Terraria but this game is pretty easy to switch to from playing 3D games.

Storyline:

The developers probably had a real laugh when they wrote the script, at one point the AI tells me, “it’s dangerous to go alone,” I nearly burst out laughing at that one. Laughs aside, the devs gave you real feelings for the poor AI who is stuck in the ship unless Ensign can help them both out. They start the game out with a beautifully painted backstory with the AI as a narrator. Then during another session of gameplay, as I pick up a hacking pack, he tells me that he knew the maintenance man that it belonged to, and the man would have liked me to have it, “he was a good guy,” it said to me.

Overall this game has a lot of potential and I can’t wait to play more of it. It appears the game is still in development so if you find some bugs, don’t be afraid. Just shoot ‘em.